Yesterday, my post highlighted the role education has played as a powerful political issue in North Carolina. In particular, I said that the budgets passed by Republicans will be a liability for Thom Tillis. I got quite a bit of push back from my Republican friends.
One common refrain is that, in fact, the GOP budgets gave more to K-12 than the last Democratic budget. That’s the wrong argument. The 2013-14 budget was still below pre-recession levels and the population is still growing at healthy clip, so the state is spending less per pupil. But even that doesn’t really matter.
What matters is that schools are cutting programs, classrooms have fewer instructors, parents are being asked to give more money for supplies, and teachers are leaving the state because of lousy pay and increasing workloads. Instead of addressing these concerns, the GOP’s response is, essentially, “Get over it. We’ve done more than the Democrats.”
The response is wrong on so many levels, but it’s especially wrong because if there is really more money in public schools, where did it go? Why are superintendents, principals, and school board members all claiming that schools are underfunded? Are they lying, or are the politicians in Raleigh lying? But more importantly, who does the public believe? My money is on the local school administrators.
Ok, GOP, let me help you step out of your bubble and tell you what the public sees. They see debates about raising property taxes to cover budget shortfalls in schools. They see mean-spirited attacks on teachers that question their commitment and workload. They see public money going to subsidize private schools. And they see a transparently cynical move by McCrory and the legislature to give teachers raises to cover their political asses.
What they haven’t seen, is an answer to where the money went. Why? Because we all know that the money went to cover the cost of a massive tax cut for the rich and big corporations.
And that is the nut. The GOP legislature believes that it’s more important for people who have benefited most from our economic system to keep more of their money than it is for our kids to have better schools.
Thomas Mills is the founder and publisher of PoliticsNC.com. Before beginning PoliticsNC, Thomas spent twenty years as a political and public affairs consultant. Learn more >
and let’s not forget the giant balls of sweaty, sticky money going to Pearson for the new gradebook and attendance system, which barely works, and all of the standardized tests that are full of bad questions, and all the material developed to go with the Common Core, most of which are poorly developed, developmentally inappropriate, or just plain-old-ordinary run-of-the-mill worksheets that do nothing for developing higher order thinking skills. Pearson has gotten a significant portion of the K-12 budget from our bought and paid-for legislators.
This is standard ReTeaVangeliban governance: cut taxes and spending hard, so that when Democrats eventually are elected, they will have so much to to just to get back to pre-ReThuglican levels that they will get pushback and have to settle for some degree of permanent damage, at which point they will be called failures by the ReConregressives and be thrown out so the cycle can start over, from further down the field. That is the plan, obviously.
Ya gotta just love it when GOPers specifically talk absolute numbers or percentages or rates depending on whether it helps their arguments or not. The proposed K-12 ed budget may be bigger in absolute terms than in 2010, but, as you asked, Thomas, where will that increase go? We know it hasn’t gone to teacher salaries yet, but looks like some of it will. But we also know that some of it will go to a larger number of charter schools. And some will go to private schools via vouchers, too.
In addition, what GOPers fail to consider is that, since 2010 (the year their party took the NCGA majority), the state’s population has grown by and estimated 450-500,000 people of which some 100-125,000 are school-aged kids under 18 ( (US Census Bureau estimates). In many cases, to handle this increase, new additional public schools (or expansion-driven facilities) have been built/leased in counties having experienced that population growth, requiring staffing and operations money.
The GOP can pat itself on the back all it wants about allocating “more money for education,” but it’s pretty clear to these eyes that any increase in ed funding is (a) being eaten up/diverted/diluted by the GOP’s advancement of their preferred educational system (charter/private schools) and (b) by the demographics of a fast growing state.
NCGOP thinks the voters are exceptionally stupid. As I am new to NC, I am really hoping they are wrong. I have never seen politicians as duplicitous as this group in power right now in NC. And thought I’d seen everything prior to moving here.